by Skyler Grant
Hope hugged me. Hope hugged me until I thought I might break in half. As if she were clinging to something she feared might vanish, if she let go.
I knew this meeting would feel like something, but I’d never expected it to send my entire world careening off-kilter. I didn’t expect every priority I’d ever had to realign itself in an instant.
I had a daughter. Well, daughters taking the Nine into account, but I couldn’t think about that yet. I had a daughter that was better than I deserved.
Hope finally let me go, silent.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” I said.
Cobalt said, “I explained that you were a King with a duty to your people. That your lands were in peril and worlds hung in the balance. That you had to fight and I had to go.”
It was the truth, but a kinder truth than I deserved. My relationship with the truth had been strained to the point of breaking again. I just didn’t know where to draw the line anymore.
“Who are the Nine?” Cobalt asked.
“This isn’t the place,” I said.
Cobalt stepped forward and took my hand in hers, giving it a squeeze. “We’ve spent a long time here being heroes and fighting the good fight. I raised our daughter to value the truth, even hard truths.”
That I understood. She was setting the nature of our relationship going forward. Cobalt had raised our daughter as a hero, albeit an exaggerated over-the-top hero, and to do that she’d become one herself.
I explained, “The Nine are all identical clones made from genetic material stolen by the artificial intelligences of Earth. Nine young women all with the Gifts of War and of Travel. I hadn’t realized it until I met Hope, but I now believe them all to be her sisters.”
There, the words were spoken.
Cobalt looked as stricken as I felt. Cobalt had spent most of her life fleeing from a prophecy that she would bear a child with those two Gifts—a child who would bring a great calamity.
Here we were, running away to escape a future that was at our doorstep.
“I have sisters?” Hope asked with a quaver in her voice.
Diamond stepped forward and swept her into a hug. “Yeah, honey. I think you do.”
Cobalt seemed to be carved of ice. Perfect and frozen. This wasn’t a Cobalt shocked beyond reason. This was her thinking about battle to come.
“Mother?” Cobalt asked.
“They revealed their existence when they trapped Ashera and her army upon a life world. Ashera escaped alive, but the army of the Silver City was butchered,” I said.
“She has never been dealt a defeat like that before,” Cobalt said.
“It has gotten bad. The Silver City is now in the midst of four great wars. We suspect the Nine are gathering armies,” Tiger said.
“Do you have any more bad news for me?” Cobalt asked.
Wasn’t that enough? I didn’t much like the truth, I could see why Elsora lied so much.
“Leosi is dead—again. Liara killed him. Maria is below decks heartbroken. We’re on our way to kick Liara’s ass and liberate Gob, the man who dissected you and cloned our daughter. We need him alive to save a planet,” I said.
“I already sent our goodbyes when I saw the Vainglory appear. Get us out of here. It’s a hard day to be a hero,” Cobalt said.
Chapter 6
We were back on the Crucible Shard and hovering outside of Liara’s towers. The defenses were still fully raised against us, the air shimmering with power.
“What are we dealing with in there?” Cobalt asked.
“Liara has fed for generations upon the deaths of those coming to her as a final obstacle. Two incarnations—one, who comes out in the day and is devoted to pleasure, while the other appears at night and worships pain. With the realm in perpetual darkness she has been trapped in the latter form,” I said.
“Companions?” Cobalt asked. Hope had joined us, she was holding the hand of Maria, who looked terribly confused and vulnerable to meet her half-sister so soon after her father died.
“A screamer, and a blood witch. They seemed to get stronger and have some sort of offense when we attacked them,” I said.
“Can you handle them, if we focused on Liara?” Cobalt asked.
“We did not last time. That is how father died,” Maria said.
“Hope. You’ll be on them. When they’re neutralized you’ll need to join me against Liara,” Cobalt said.
“You’ll make her suffer for what she did to my father?” Maria asked.
“We don’t do that. We’re heroes,” Hope said.
“You are,” Maria said.
Hope frowned a touch at that, but kept hold of Maria’s hand. This new family of mine was going to be all kinds of complicated.
“I want Liam with me to go after Gob,” Diamond said.
We’d decided the best approach was to split our forces. Cobalt and Hope were our biggest weapons in a fight, so would be engaging Liara directly. Diamond had some mobility from her magic and was going to be our best bet to get through whatever defensive magic the dungeons might have.
“We’re with Liam and Diamond,” Ashley said, indicating herself and Walt.
“Works for me. Let’s do it,” Cobalt said.
Diamond traced runes in the air, each sparkling with brilliant light until a complex structure hung in place. Diamond studied it for just a moment to make sure all was right and then pulled her fist back to drive it through the image, which shattered like ice.
There was screeching howl from the air around us. Below, the gates protecting the towers cracked and rune work exploded. The glow of the shields in the air sparked and faded away.
Diamond and Honor led the way off the ship. Archers were already spilling out onto the towers balconies, but with a blur of fists they were taken down. I noted they didn’t kill any of them, this really was a different side of Cobalt I’d have to get used to.
Unendurable Agony
Liara charged into the fray. With gritted teeth Cobalt was ready for her. I felt that I should be down there in the thick of it, but this part of things wasn’t our fight.
Teleport
Diamond gestured and we were elsewhere. I recognized this row of cells. While I hadn’t been trapped here before, both Walt and Ashley had spent some time inside until I rescued them. The torture they suffered here is what started to break their minds. I still kept hoping to find some way to put things right. At least now they were functional, however broken. When it came down to it, the functional was the important bit.
Cell doors of thick metal lined the walls.
“Where are we headed?” Tiger asked.
“I’m not certain. The cells are warded. Can you and Liam start knocking down doors? We’ve guards on the way,” Diamond said.
I could do that, my great strength wasn’t always as much use as I’d hope in a fight, but I made a damned good battering ram. So, it turned out, did Tiger.
I bashed down the first of the doors.
I didn’t find Gob—however I did find Aria.
I’d surrounded myself with women who didn’t usually need rescuing, all except for Aria, who happened to require it on a regular basis.
“Again in these cells?” I asked.
“Liara is a bitch. That isn’t a secret, just a fact,” Aria said.
No. It wasn’t a secret.
Heavy-armored guards charged down the hall and reached the floor that Diamond had just coated with ice. Bodies went skidding and a far more sure-footed Ashley set to work with her daggers. This wasn’t like the fight upstairs—none of us were heroes who had a problem with killing.
I bashed open a second cell. Empty.
Tiger wasn’t having any luck either.
I knocked down the third door. It might have been Gob—it was incredibly hard to tell. There was a body on the table, but it had been cut open and most of the organs partially extracted, pulled from the frame and suspended by a complex series of wires that buzzed faintly.
Just getting n
ear them made my nerves ache. This was some grisly torture from the inside out. It might be Gob, but Liara could have just been having what she considered a particularly hot date with somebody.
“Found him, maybe,” I shouted.
I heard an explosion and screams, and a disheveled-looking Diamond came rushing in. Her eyes played over the tormented figure, “That him?”
“How would I know? Whoever it is, they’re in pieces,” I said.
“It’s Gob,” Aria said, leaning against the doorway. “It’s also a trap. It is made to look like just a torture device, but the pain web is more than that.”
Diamond traced a quick spell with her fingertip and frowned. “She’s right. This is nasty work. I really don’t like that woman.”
“Yes, you do. You like it whenever anyone surprises you with how smart they are,” Aria said.
“Where did you find this all-too-chatty woman?” Diamond asked.
“Aria the Talesinger. She knows secrets, all of them. Why she didn’t tell me about Elsora or my army of daughters a little earlier, I’m not sure,” I said with a glare.
“Do you have any idea how many traumatic secrets you’re surrounded by? Give a girl a break,” Aria said.
Out in the hall there were more screams and what was becoming the familiar sound of breaking bones.
“Okay, I have a plan, but it isn’t a good one. I can invert these weaves and teleport him. That won’t snare me in an eternity of torment and agony, but it is going to feed all of that right back into him,” Diamond said.
That didn’t sound too bad so far. I didn’t particularly care if Gob suffered. I think I preferred it really.
“And?” I asked.
“Cold. He has already undergone massive physical and mental trauma, and I don’t know what that is going to do to him,” Diamond said.
“We’re on the Crucible Shard. Even if he dies he’ll respawn back. We want to avoid that though, because it may be somewhere Liara still has under her control,” I said.
“Then I guess you are just worried about his mind. This could destroy it. I’ll try it, if you want, or you can try to do this all later when you have a better plan,” Diamond said.
Gob’s mind was the entire reason that we were doing all of this. We were trying to save Earth. If we lost it we’d have to go with Mela’s plan instead. I also had a bunch of clone daughters about to send the universe to war and I really needed to start focusing on that.
“Can you give me any kind of odds?” I asked.
“I’m good. I’m very good. Sixty percent that we do this and I keep his mind intact,” Diamond said.
That was a forty percent chance of having to destroy Earth. Very nearly a coin-flip.
There were more screams from the hall. I didn’t have time to dwell. It was better to act than not to act.
“Do it,” I said.
Diamond reached out her hand into the complex web holding Gob, her eyes wincing for just a moment.
The world shimmered and we were back on the deck of the Vainglory.
True Heal
Gob was now free of the web. A pile of organs and bones and distorted flesh on the deck. Without hesitation Diamond plunged her hands into the mass of it and they glowed a brilliant white.
There was the wet slurping sound of a body reassembling itself and Gob was whole once again.
“Is he okay?” I asked.
Cobalt and Hope leapt back onto the deck, Cobalt sporting a black eye and most of the flesh of one shoulder a burned ruin. Hope had a slight limp.
“We need to go,” Cobalt said.
Behind them the tower looked to be partly caved in and a fire was burning.
Diamond was checking over Gob and she glanced up to shake her head. “I’m sorry. Physically he is in good health. The mind—it was just too much. A purely human brain would have broken, but he had the ability to wipe himself. He did.”
Almost everyone on the deck had some sort of injury. This battle had been hard fought. We’d brought the biggest guns we had, but it wasn’t enough.
We were going to have to do something terrible.
Chapter 7
We were back on Earth for what would probably be the last time. The Vainglory materialized and everyone met on the deck to discuss the plan. It wasn’t going well.
“You can’t seriously be proposing to wipe out an entire planet,” Hope said. That was me, winning points with my newfound daughter.
“I’d prefer to think of it as relocating the population,” I said.
“By killing every single one of them and copying their brains. Mom, agree with me that this is a terrible idea,” Hope said.
“It isn’t a great one. You’re the smart one, don’t you have anything better?” Cobalt asked Diamond.
“Millions of people on a world with no natural inter-dimensional portals? Not really. Their fix is crude, but grabbing the neural framework and storing them in a divine/software construct for later reintegration off-world is actually quite clever,” Diamond said.
“It seems a lot like mass murder,” Hope said.
Ashley giggled. That wasn’t helpful.
“Mela. Can you please get in here and explain how it isn’t actually going to be that bad,” I said.
Nanites swarmed the deck and after a moment Mela stepped out of the grey cloud.
“Not sure exactly what you’re wanting me to say here,” Mela said.
“That it really is for the best and you can make it relatively painless,” I said.
“That isn’t really true. I’ve got to generate a high level of neural activity, and high adrenaline levels are going to help with the nerve mapping,” Mela said.
I closed my eyes for a minute. She wasn’t doing this to me. Of course, she was doing this to me.
“You’re basically planning to hunt people through the streets with murder bots as your nanoplague maps their every terrified reactions, aren’t you,” I said.
“Yes…” Mela said, looking between everyone. “I mean, how else am I going to do it?”
“Really?” Hope asked, looking ready to take us all on. I was kind of proud of her, while also finding her incredibly inconvenient right now.
“This isn’t our world. It’s theirs. It is their choice to make, if this is how they want to proceed,” Cobalt said. This wasn’t really a democracy, but I also didn’t think we’d have any dissent. If this is what it took to make things okay I was willing to entertain it.
Yve said, “Neither of us like it, but it is the option in front us. Ultimately it frees humanity from all they’ve ever known and opens up a whole new world to them.”
Ashley shrugged. “I already killed a bunch of them. It was fun. I guess it’s okay if the rest survive.”
Walt said, “I don’t remember the place. Do whatever you want.”
Hope just looked from face to face seeming a little sick to her stomach. “Then I don’t have to watch. I’m going to go check on Maria.”
Cobalt waited as Hope walked way, then she flashed us all a smile that was almost rueful.
“A daughter with morals? In our family? What were you thinking,” Diamond said.
“I was thinking I’d try to do at least one decent thing with my life. I have, and she is not wrong. I agree that this seems necessary, but you should feel bad about it,” Cobalt said.
If that was the objective, mission accomplished.
“Is there anything else you need to make this happen?” I asked Mela.
“Just ask me to do it. I’ve never actually been asked before,” Mela said.
If that was how it was going to be.
“Mela, could you please exterminate all human life on Earth in a mechanical plague and store their minds,” I said.
Ashley giggled again. Damn it.
Mela grinned, “Yeah. That felt as good as I’d imagined. It’s kind of nice to be wanted for what you’re good at. It will be a few weeks to get them all.”
This would look great on my evil resume. Des
troyer of Earth.
“Take us back to Castle Sardonis. It’s time we had a chat with my wife and made a plan for what to do with the Nine,” I said.
Chapter 8
The transition back to the Crucible Shard was uneventful and we called an impromptu war council.
While the others gathered in the war room I pulled Elsora aside. I had a lot to discuss with my new wife.
When the door to the side room closed behind us she leaned in to press against my lips. Nice, really nice, but not what I was looking for.
“You have questions,” Elsora said finally, breaking off the kiss.
“Did you know?” I asked.
Elsora did me the courtesy of not pretending she didn’t know exactly what I meant. “I didn’t swear that wedding vow regarding your children for no reason. I always knew exactly who and what the Nine were.”
Of course she had.
“You could have told me,” I said.
“I thought it best that you see with your own eyes. I wasn’t sure you’d believe me otherwise,” Elsora said.
That was the downside of lying all the time.
“What am I going to do?” I asked. I hadn’t let myself feel overwhelmed until this moment, but here with her for a moment I could let it all wash over me.
Elsora wrapped her arms around me, “Nothing you have to do alone, love. I have plans, you know I always have plans.”
I did. It was one of the best and most maddening things about her.
“Are they really my daughters? It isn’t just some sort of scheme by Gob?” I asked.
“They are. It is no scheme. Gob had a hard time working with most of the stolen samples, but when they captured Cobalt it presented them an opportunity,” Elsora said.
I said, “And what of our child? You’ve led me to believe that you’d used some of those samples yourself to conceive, seeking the power of the Silver City, but now that I know who you really are…”